Rumor mill: SSD manufacturers are busy cramming more and more bits into NAND flash cells, but new software and games are catching up to take advantage of the speed characteristics of solid state storage. If word on the street is to be believed, we'll soon have a new faster PCIe 4.0 SSD on the market to see those benefits, courtesy of Samsung.
Back in January, one of the unassuming gems of CES 2020 was Samsung's 980 Pro SSD, which is still cooking in the company's labs with no official launch date in sight and lots of unanswered questions about how it'll perform in real-life tasks. In the meantime, other manufacturers have been happy to fill the gap as seen in our Best Storage guide where two PCIe 4.0 SSDs from Sabrent and Corsair topped the charts with leading performance and excellent pricing.
We know that the upcoming NVMe SSD from Samsung will be of the PCIe 4.0 variety, which means you'll soon have more choice of high-end SSDs to pair with AMD X570 and B550 motherboards, as well as Zen 3 CPUs.
According to a renown Twitter leaker, Samsung is readying the launch of the 980 Pro SSD for later this summer, which makes sense given the pandemic-related delays in supply chain and manufacturing, and the fact that the company told AnandTech to expect more information by the end of this month.
Moreover, just this week we saw a few Amazon listings for a Samsung 870 QVO SSD, which is Samsung's solution for growing game installations and archival needs of PC and console enthusiasts alike – that could come in an 8 TB variant.
As for the 980 Pro, Samsung at CES hinted that it's geared towards performance, with lower capacities of between 250 GB and 1 TB, but sequential read speeds of up to 6,500 MB per second and write speeds of up to 5,000 MB per second. That would make it quite similar to the SSD in the PlayStation 5.